While the Sydney Opera House has been the definition of beautiful performing centers for many generations, new and exciting architecture is taking the world by storm and many people haven't even seen pictures some of the gems from the last ten or fifteen years. Take the new "Zaha Hadid's Guangzhou Opera House" in China. This awe-inspiring mix of angles, flowing curves, lights, glass and space is just as spectacular as any show you will see on the stage. Speckled with painstaking detail and mind-numbing engineering, the building itself is a performance, displaying man's struggle to breaks the bonds of physics. It almost feels as though the building expands and contracts as the people flow through. Almost a living being, experiencing each performance within itself.
The real question is.........does it work?
As anyone who knows anything about any kind of music knows, acoustics are almost as important as the instruments (or singers in opera's case) themselves. And though an opera house can get sponsors and interest through the beauty of the building, it will only succeed as long as the acoustics perform as well, or better than the performers on stage. But as we wait for that debate to be settled, just bask in the beauty of such a building. A great symbol of a new city and trading center and a wonderful sign that we are not resigning to lives among gray concrete and steel.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/feb/28/guangzhou-opera-house-zaha-hadid
No comments:
Post a Comment